NSF Convergence Accelerator Track F: Co-designing for Trust: Reimagining Online Information Literacies with Underserved Communities

Misinformation – inaccurate or misleading information – has emerged as a growing threat to American democracy since it undermines citizen trust in public information and institutions. It often does so by exploiting personal beliefs, emotions, and identity, thereby triggering responses that expand social divides and encourage individuals to actively resist competing claims.

Solutions must not only provide the public with skills for determining the truthfulness of claims, but must also provide resources for addressing the social and emotional impacts of misinformation. This requires a fundamental reimagining of our approach to digital literacy, so that it is better grounded in the everyday realities of the communities most impacted by misinformation.

This is particularly true for underserved communities, who are disproportionately targeted by misinformation. The project will address this need by creating local solutions alongside digital literacy interventionists – the community organizations, librarians, teachers, and others already focused on providing formal and informal education to address misinformation within their communities.

The project will build community-oriented infrastructure that enables underserved communities to design, collaborate on, and share educational resources that address misinformation. It will leverage participatory design with digital literacy interventionists to create locally-contextualized digital literacy resources for rural communities and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities.

It will also design and implement a socio-technical platform that supports digital literacy interventionists to engage in the ongoing design of educational resources as a Community of Practice (CoP). This platform will allow us to scale and sustain the work to generate an enduring impact on how the nation addresses misinformation. Ultimately, this project will generate knowledge of how participatory design processes can be developed to scale local interventions.

It will also advance our understanding of how sociocultural contexts and knowledge systems can shape digital literacy interventions, so that these interventions are better able to motivate and support diverse communities as they resist misinformation.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.